Meta is installing new tracking software on U.S.-based employees’ computers to capture mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes for use in training its artificial intelligence models, part of a broad initiative to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously, the company told staffers in internal memos seen by Reuters.
The tool, called Model Capability Initiative (MCI), will run on a list of work-related apps and websites and will also take occasional snapshots of the content on employees’ screens for context, according to one of the memos, posted by a staff AI research scientist on Tuesday in a channel for the company’s model-building Meta SuperIntelligence Labs team.
The purpose of the exercise, according to the memo, was to improve the company’s AI models in areas where they still struggle to replicate how humans interact with computers, like choosing from dropdown menus and using keyboard shortcuts.
“This is where all Meta employees can help our models get better simply by doing their daily work,” it said.
The data-gathering announcement comes a day after Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth told employees in a separate memo that the company would step up internal data collection as part of its AI for Work (AI4W) efforts.
Meta’s AI-First Strategy
Bosworth did not explicitly spell out what data would be used for that initiative, now re-branded as Agent Transformation Accelerator (ATA), but said Meta would be “rigorous” about “building up data and evals for all the types of interactions we have as we go about our work.”
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone acknowledged that the MCI data would be among those inputs.
Bosworth said in his memo: “The vision we are building towards is one where our agents primarily do the work and our role is to direct, review and help them improve.” The aim, he added, was “a closed loop” in which agents could “automatically see where we felt the need to intervene so they can be better next time.”
Stone said the data collected via MCI would not be used for performance assessments or any other purpose besides model training and that safeguards were in place to protect “sensitive content,” without elaborating on which types of data would be excluded.
“If we’re building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them — things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus. To help, we’re launching an internal tool that will capture these kinds of inputs on certain applications to help us train our models,” said Stone.
AI Workforce Overhaul
The push to automate functions previously performed by human staffers reflects a broad pattern among major U.S. companies this year, especially in the tech sector.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been moving aggressively to integrate AI into the social media giant’s workflows and reshape its workforce around the technology, arguing it will make the company operate more efficiently.
AI tools have captivated Silicon Valley with their ability to handle complex tasks such as creating apps, building spreadsheets and organizing large volumes of data with limited human oversight. This has sparked a selloff in stocks of traditional software companies and inspired some executives to plan extensive job cuts.
Meta is planning to lay off 10% of its workforce globally starting on May 20 and is eyeing additional large cuts later this year.
Amazon.com similarly has trimmed 30,000 corporate employees in recent months, representing nearly 10% of its white-collar workers, while in February the fintech company Block chopped nearly half of its staff.
Internally, the Facebook and Instagram owner has been exhorting staffers to use AI agents for coding and other tasks, even if it slows them down in the short term. It has also been wiping out distinctions between certain job functions in favor of a new general-purpose job title called “AI builder.”
Last month, it created a new Applied AI (AAI) engineering team aimed at improving the coding capabilities of Meta’s AI models and using them to craft AI agents that can perform the bulk of the work to build, test and ship future products and infrastructure at Meta.
Meta started transferring “strong” software engineers into AAI earlier this month.
(Reporting by Katie Paul in New York and Jeff Horwitz in San Francisco; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
